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 Crime and Punishment: A Novel in Six Parts with Epilogue (1866)
by Fyodor Dostoevsky, translated by Richard Pevear & Larissa Volokhonsky
564 pages - Vintage Classics
Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov is a former student, having dropped out before finishing his studies, who currently lives in a small garrett apartment, and is barely scraping by without much hope for the future. A plan occurs to him to murder an old woman who works as a pawnbroker, but complications occur as he tries to carry out his plan. Inter-weaved with the plot of the killing is the story of Raskolnikov's mother and sister arriving in Petersburg so that his sister can be married (strictly because they are in need of money), and as well another thread where Raskolnikov gets to know a drunkard civil servant and his chaotic family, which includes an eldest sister who has become a prostitute to support them.
 This was my second time reading this much-praised story, though it was the first time I read this translation. The first one I read was by Constance Garnett, who is criticized for making all the authors she translated sound the same, like late-period Victorians. That was my first read by Dostoevsky, and went to read most of his works (many in translations by Pevear & Volokhonsky) and I suppose he became one of my favourite authors. But in reading this particular work in the more faithful translation, I have to say it was a bit of a slog, and I didn't thoroughly enjoy it, though I'm not sure if that's because of the rough and scattered style of the original, or simply because time has moved on. Dostoevsky's style has always been very frantic and a bit disorganized (with often noticeable changes in focus over the course of a novel, the result of having originally been published in serialized form), and I did feel like he perhaps could use a good editor like Garnett. The sweep and final resolution of the novel is still very affecting, but I can't say the novel as a whole lived up to my previous memories.
'Do you know how I regard you? I regard you as one of those men who could have their guts cut out, and would stand and look at his torturers with a smile--provided he's found faith, or God. Well, go and find it, and you will live. First of all, you've needed a change of air for a long time. And suffering is a good thing, after all. Suffer, then. Mikolka may be right in wanting to suffer. I know belief doesn't come easily--but don't be too clever about it, just give yourself directly to life, without reasoning; don't worry--it will carry you straight to shore and set you on your feet. What shore? How do I know? I only believe that you have much life ahead of you. I know you're taking what I say to you now as a prepared oration, but maybe you'll remember it later and find it useful; that's why I'm saying it to you. It's good that you only killed a little old woman. If you'd come up with a different theory, you might have done something a hundred million times more hideous! Maybe you should still thank God; how do you know, maybe God is saving you for something. Be of great heart, and fear less.' (pg. 420)
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A School for Fools (1976)
by Sasha Sokolov, translated by Carl R. Proffer
228 pages - Ardis
Ok, I finally got back to my scheduled re-reading that I'd planned out earlier in the year. Briefly, this is a book narrated in a very stream-of-consciousness style by someone who is in a 'special school'. The writing is really beautiful and I still think it is a great book. I'm usually not interested in 'experimental' writing, and describing something as being 'stream-of-consciousness' is usually a real turn-off, but it works here, and wonderfully so.
'...the main thing: that they, the rhododendrons, growing every minute somewhere in alpine meadows, are far happier than we, for they know neither love, nor hate, nor the Perillo slipper system, and they don't even die, since all nature, excepting man, is one undying, indestructible whole. If one tree somewhere in a forest perishes from old age, before dying, it gives the wind so many seeds, and so many new trees grow up around it on the land, near and far, that the old tree, especially the rhododendron--and a rhododendron, Veta Arcadievna, which is probably a huge tree with leaves the size of wash basins,--doesn't mind dying. And the tree is indifferent, it just grows there on the silvery hill, or the new one does, after it has grown up out of its seeds. No, the tree doesn't mind. Or the grass, or the dog, or the rain. Only man minds and feels bitter, burdened as he is with egotistical pity for himself. Rememer, even Savl, who devoted himself entirely to science and his students, said, after dying, it's damned maddening.' (pg.227)
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Roadside Picnic (1972)
by Arkady & Boris Strugatsky
145 pages - Gollancz SF Masterworks
At five spots on the earth, an alien 'Visitation' occurs, and the areas undergo a sort of disaster. The aliens, if that's what they are, soon depart, but leave many of their artifacts and other strange phenomena behind. These become Zones forbidden to the regular population, where scientists tentatively explore, and black-market opportunists known as Stalkers trespass in order to bring out artifacts to sell.
The novel focuses on a Zone in Canada, and specifically on a stalker named Redrick Schuhart, who over the years works both officially and illegally in the Zone, and interacts with other stalkers, businessmen, and government officials. He also gets married and has a mutant daughter, as all the children of people who spend time in the Zone produce mutant children.
This novel was the basis for the excellent film Stalker, and after having finished reading it, I am sorry to say that it doesn't quite measure up to the film version. I guess it's true what they say, that great books often make mediocre movies, but mediocre books can make great movies. The novel was still pretty good, but I think it really went downhill in the last section (about the last 40 pages), a point at which I had assumed it would get even better. The book is also mostly written in an almost hard-boiled style, where the characters are often snarling at each other, and either punching other people or thinking about doing so -- a bit of a contrast with both the film and most written SF. I also found myself waiting for moments that turned out to only be in the film. For example, much of the story centres around a rumoured artifact deep in the Zone that is able to make your deepest, truest wish come true. I was waiting for the moment when the book would tell the story of the man who wished for his dead brother to return, but when he came out of the Zone only found himself immensely rich; unfortunately, I realized at the end that this neat story was only in the film.
Perhaps the most fascinating thing about this novel (and the film based on it) is how much it has bled over into real life. Though both were made before the Chernobyl disaster, the forbidden area around that real-life disaster is known as the Zone of Alienation, which is colloquially referred to as 'The Zone', and many of the scientists that do work there have been known to call themselves stalkers. The Zone of Alienation is really fascinating, as it's both a nuclear disaster area and a large area of the modern world that has been almost entirely given back to nature, and you can find many interesting travelogues of the area online, like this one here.
It's a pretty interesting book, but it doesn't really wrap up the story in a satisfying fashion. I do highly recommend the 1979 Tarkovsky film Stalker. The title of the novel comes from the idea that the alien artifacts left behind are like things people leave behind after a roadside picnic; afterwards the animals come around and poke about and maybe get some benefit and some harm, but no real understanding occurs.
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Fathers and Sons (1861)
by Ivan Turgenev, translated by Rosemary Edmonds
295 pages - Penguin Classics
A young man, having graduated university, returns home to his family's estate, and brings along a university friend, Bazarov. Bazarov calls himself a 'nihilist', and chafes at social customs and commonly-held ideas. The two men also go on several short trips to neighbouring towns, meeting friends, relatives, as well as women they become interested in. This all takes place in the wake of the recent emancipation of the serfs. The literal translation of the title is Fathers and Children, and this Penguin edition includes a 50-page lecture at the beginning by Isaiah Berlin, 'Fathers and Children: Turgenev and the Liberal Predicament', where, as far as I gathered, Berlin basically states that Turgenev thought what Berlin thinks, and moreover was precisely correct in doing so.
The shadow of this book looms large, and while I didn't really enjoy reading it that much, after a bit of reflection I think that's at least as much due to the reputation of the novel rather than the work itself. People always emphasize the political themes of the story, which sets you up anticipating something like Dostoevsky or Tolstoy. But the actual political or philosophical content is fairly minimal, and even the conflict of generations alluded to in the title really only (somewhat) occupies the first third of the book. What receives far more emphasis is the various potential romantic relationships, and in that way it's much closer to a prototypical French novel than to the other great works of 19th century Russian literature (which is understandable, considering how absorbed Turgenev was in Parisian life). I think I would have enjoyed this a lot more if I hadn't been aware of the reputation and purported cultural impact of the book, and just read it for the slight, episodic tale that it is.
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Leviathan (1998)
by Boris Akunin, translated by Andrew Bromfield
236 pages - Weidenfeld & Nicholson
This is the third book in the series of mysteries involving Erast Fandorin, though it was the second published in English. Some editions use the title Murder on the Leviathan. Each of the Fandorin mysteries is written in a different style, and this particular book takes the form of an Agatha Christie-type mystery. A group of suspects are gathered together on the maiden voyage of a luxury cruise liner and we get to know the characters and their secrets while they all try to figure out which one of the group is the criminal.
I picked this book to read as I felt like I was in a bit of a slump, especially in regards to fiction, and this seemed like the most light fun out of anything on my shelves. I liked this a bit better than the first book, The Winter Queen, though by the end I really didn't have much wish to continue on in this series. I think the author confuses an increased body count with increased drama, and the characters are more like caricatures than real personalities. It was mildly amusing, but nothing remarkable. And I found it quite easy to stay ahead of the plot, guessing most of the major mysteries long before they're revealed in words.
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Instant Light: Tarkovsky Polaroids (2004)
edited by Giovanni Chiaramonte and Andrey A. Tarkovsky
135 pages - Thames & Hudson
 From 1979 to 1984, filmmaker Andrey Tarkovsky owned a Polaroid camera and used it to capture images of interest. Now, I mostly associate instant Polaroids with cheap and bad photos whenever I'd visit my grandmother, so it is stunning to see the beauty of these photos which were made with the exact same sort of idiot-proof camera most of us have handled. Most of the photos are either of the landscape and people around his country home in Russia, or taken during his time in Italy. Occasionally, the page opposite a photo has some text from poems or thoughts that Tarkovsky wrote down in his journals. This is really a stunning book, on so many images the play of light is so exquisite that the image feels like something from your own memory, some moment in the soft sunlight that you can suddenly half-remember. The images also strongly evoke Tarkovsky's mystical Christian faith, which all his work was steeped in, and so every person is there with the consciousness that God lives in each one of them, and animals such as dogs and birds are symbolically God's messengers, but not 'just symbolically', and not even a field of scrabbly wildflowers or a leaning weathered fencepost will ever truly be forgotten in this world that God created out of His love; and then perhaps when we take the step out of the flow of time to live solely in eternity, we will come back and re-visit that wooden table at home with dishes of food casually assembled on it by a loved one's hand, run through a dewey wood accompanied by a panting dog, or stand on the shore's edge as mist rises off the water as it's touched by the morning sunlight. Perhaps all of this only metaphorically, but there is no concrete truth beyond metaphor. This Guardian page has a few more of the photos. Andrey Tarkovsky was greatly influenced by his father, Arseny, a poet, whose work was featured in many of his son's films, and some of his work is quoted in this book: Death does not exist
we are all immortal
and everything is immortal.
At seventeen
one should not fear death, nor at seventy.
Being and light alone have reality, darkness and death have no existence
Were are all already on the shore of the sea
and are among those who drag the nets
while immortality gleams behind them
Live in the house and it will not fall down.
I shall call forth any century at all,
to enter into it and build my house.
This is how your children and wives
will sit with me at the table.
One sole table for ancestor and descendant.
The future is happening now.
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Eugene Onegin and Other Poems
by Alexander Pushkin, translated by Charles Johnston
240 pages - Everyman's Library Pocket Poets
This book-length poem introduces the title character, Eugene Onegin, and his friend, Vladimir Lensky - both of whom are dandy-ish characters that enjoy parties, poetry, pretension, etc. They meet two sisters, Olga and Tatyana, but while Tatyana falls for Onegin, he actually noses in on Olga, who Lensky has become engaged to. A duel is arranged between Onegin and Lensky. Two shorter poems are also included in the book, "Onegin's Journey" and "The Bronze Horseman".
Eugene Onegin has an immense reputation as, essentially, the wellspring of all russian literature, and so I was quite surprised to pick it up and find something that's actually very light and jokey and somewhat irreverent. The rhyming scheme can get a bit grating over 200+ pages (and must have been difficult to keep intact while translating), but I was also surprised to become quite caught up in the narrative as it went along, and it indeed does become quite an impressive work at the end (though the end is somewhat unresolved). It kind of snuck up on me, how much I actually enjoyed it.
Another page of recollection:
sometimes, in reverie's sacred land,
I grasp a stirrup with affection,
I feel a small foot in my hand;
fancies once more are hotly bubbling,
once more that touch is fiercely troubling
the blood within my withered heart,
once more the love, once more the smart...
But, now I've praised the queens of fashion,
enough of my loquacious lyre:
they don't deserve what they inspire
in terms of poetry or passion--
their looks and language in deceit
are just as nimble as their feet.
- Chapter One, stanza XXXIV
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Notes From Underground (1864)
by Fyodor Dostoevsky, translated by Richard Pevear & Larissa Volokhonsky
136 pages - Vintage Classics
'...all this will produce a most unpleasant impression, because we've all grown unaccustomed to life, we're all lame, each of us more or less. We've even grown so unaccustomed that at times we feel a sort of loathing for real "living life," and therefore cannot bear to be reminded of it. For we've reached a point where we regard real "living life" almost as labor, almost as service, and we all agree in ourselves that it's better from a book.'(pg.129)
The narrator introduces himself in the first part of the book, "Underground", and proceeds to go on a rant/screed/confession. He is a former civil servant who has retired to a meager little apartment after inheriting some money, and though he is full of misery and spite and many other things, he is happy that at least his spite is his own. The narrator goes at a lot of targets here, but one of his primary attacks is against the idea that scientific and economic progress will lead to universal human happiness. He attacks the idea that life can be refined down to a scientific formula, and that once everybody's motivations are put on a chart, and harmonized, we can all progress together, in peace. The underground man says this is nonsense, because people do not act in enlightened self-interest, and in fact if you built someone a life that was happy and well-ordered and rational, the one human thing that that person would be sure to do is to mangle and destroy it, if only to assert that he still has some measure of freedom. Interestingly, Dostoevsky apparently included a Christian alternative to the isolation and hatred of the narrator, but that was cut out by the censors.
In the second part, "Apropos of the Wet Snow", the narrator relates some episodes that occurred in his past, in his mid-twenties, when he was still something of a frustrated dreamer. First, he is insulted by a burly officer who moves him out of the way as though he's a chair, and our narrator then neurotically tries to 'get back' at him, following the officer around, fantasizing different schemes day and night while the officer is not even aware that this man exists. Then, the narrator forces himself into a circle of old school acquaintances whom he actually despises, and invites himself to a going-away dinner they're holding for one of them. The narrator does not want to be there, the others don't want him there, but he stubbornly stays and endures humiliation, awkwardness, hostility. The night ends at a brothel, where, while lying beside a prostitute, he starts talking romantic bookish nonsense which he doesn't believe himself, but sounds quite nice when divorced from reality. He plants a seed of hope in this prostitute, but when she comes to his apartment to see him several days later, he is back to being ridden with anxiety and neurosis, and he tries to insult and demean her in as cutting a way as possible so that she'll leave.
I've been fond of referring to this book as my autobiography, at least in some emotional sense. Re-reading it again (probably at least my 3rd reading), I don't think I felt the connection quite as intensely, but it's unquestionably a staggering piece of writing. It's a monumental work on several levels. Philosophically, it condenses the argument against the systemization of reality, and Hegel-derived socialism; and in mocking the meager limits of reason it's probably the best fictional representation of the existentialist position. In terms of literature, it is an unsurpassed example of the extreme subjectivity possible when using an unreliable narrator, and how the character's psychology shapes the style of the book; and in terms of Dostoevsky's development as a writer, it's really the gateway into his greatest works. And, on a personal level, for the individual reader, it's hard to find any greater or more intimate and intense exploration of alienation, anxiety, social awkwardness, and of the outsider who both shuns and is shunned by society, but also torments himself about it at every moment.
A very rewarding re-read, though I'm not sure I was quite in the mood for it. Up next month is Crime and Punishment, in the Pevear & Volokhonsky translation which I have not read before.
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The Complete Short Novels
by Anton Chekhov, translated by Richard Pevear & Larissa Volokhonsky
548 pages - Everyman's Library
This is a collection of five novellas by Chekhov, though I guess they decided that 'short novel' is a more marketable term. They are:
"The Steppe: The Story of a Journey" - A nine-year-old boy leaves home and travels across the steppe to a town where he will go to school. Chekhov hasn't really found his voice yet here, and the style tries very hard to imitate Gogol - sometimes successfully, sometimes not. There's a lot of very lyrical description of nature, a lot of anthropomorphizing, and a wonderful sequence in a thunderstorm.
"The Duel" - A cast of characters in a small town on the Black Sea interact and chafe against each other, eventually leading to a duel between two of them. This was sometimes quite funny and amusing.
"The Story of an Unknown Man" - A political revolutionary who has contracted tuberculosis goes undercover and gets a job as a servant in the house of the son of an important government official. As he observes the life that occurs there he becomes disinterested with his original goals and finds new concerns which become important to him.
"Three Years" - The main character is the son of a wealthy businessman. He experiences a series of disappointments and changes in fortune as he struggles with his inability to live - possibly the prototypical Chekhovian struggle. I found it a refreshing change from the usual cliches that he becomes depressed and dissatisfied with his marriage immediately following his wedding.
"My Life: A Provincial's Story" - A nobleman finds little success in making a career early in life, and soon descends to becoming a common labourer, embracing the hardscrabble existence of a peasant but escaping the hypocrisy of the intelligentsia. Doing this, he deals with intense disapproval from his overbearing father and the entire close-minded provincial town. Eventually, a sensitive, isolated woman in town, also the child of a successful father, marries him, and they try to set up an ideal life on a farm. But, everything passes. Or, as the narrator says at the end in opposition to that view, nothing passes. This story includes a lot of the anger and disgust Chekhov felt about his own hometown:
"Our town has existed for hundreds of years, and in all that time it hasn't given our motherland a single useful man--not one! You've stifled in the womb everything that had the least bit of life or brightness! A town of shopkeepers, tavern keepers, clerks, hypocrites, a needless, useless town, for which not a single soul would be sorry if it suddenly sank into the earth."
I can't deny how well these stories are written, but most of them seem to go on far too long, and perhaps that is why the majority of Chekhov's stories are far shorter. A lot of characters and events pass by which have no bearing on the real story, and could easily be edited out. It makes more tedious the already trying experience of reading stories that are like an overcast February day.
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Winter Notes on Summer Impressions (1863)
by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, translated by Kyril FitzLyon
93 pages - Quartet Books
These are some thoughts and reflections on Dostoevsky's trip to Western Europe in the summer of 1862 that were originally published in a periodical he edited. This book is mostly focused on his time in France and England, though to be honest there is minimal space given to actual impressions and experiences, and they mostly serve as a springboard for FD to talk about whatever he feels like talking about. It's also written in a sort of jokey, repetitive, often ironical style, and there's not a lot of development of thought; though on several pages he does articulate thoughts that he would develop in later, more weighty works. This was kind of a disappointing read, as it's just not very much of anything at all.
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Omon Ra (1992)
by Victor Pelevin, translated by Andrew Bromfield
154 pages - Farrar, Straus & Giroux
Omon (named after Soviet special police) is a boy growing up in a small town in Russia. He dreams of becoming a cosmonaut, and follows that career path, going to a special school and then into the military. One he passes his exams, he learns that most of Soviet technology is a sham - they don't even have any real nuclear weapons - and he'll be part of a crew that will be sacrificed when the Soviets send an 'automated' probe to the moon, which is secretly actually run in a very low-tech way by humans hidden inside it.
This sounded like it had some potential, but the story is told in an awkward sort of way. There are a few remarkable sections here and there, but mostly it feels like something is missing. I'm sure reading it in Russian, with an intimate knowledge of Soviet history and culture, would make it more rewarding. I hung on until the end because it's quite a short book, and there's a lot of talk of a 'surprise/shocking' ending. Indeed the only thing that ends up being surprising is that the only reason you didn't seriously entertain this end as a possibility, was because it is the most mundane and obvious and un-dynamic possibility. Additionally, it actually severely undercuts the rickety logic of the story that built up to it.
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A Hero of Our Time (1840)
by Mikhail Lermontov, translated by Paul Foote
185 pages - Penguin Classics
This book is essentially split into two parts, both of which occur in the Caucasus. In the first part, the main character, Pechorin, is glimpsed from a distance, present in the narrative mostly just by others telling stories about him. The second half is composed of entries from Pechorin's diary, where we get exposed to his inner thoughts and feelings. Throughout, Pechorin is a kind of maladjusted romantic hero, who is mostly out to cause trouble and amuse himself, until he can find his own death.
This is a very important book in the development of Russian literature, but I didn't feel like it was much of a book when read today, in isolation from what it influenced. The descriptions of travel and nature in the first part are quite appealing, but the more we find out about Pechorin, and get closer to him, the slower and less interesting the story gets. In the end, Pechorin really isn't a very compelling character, and he lacks depth - his diary entries spell out everything on the surface, as though they were character sketches by the author rather than journal entries. Nobody actually writes out their motivations in black-and-white like that, if they can even articulate them. So, just kinda mediocre, though at least it was a fast read.
'Yet what strength they derived from this certainty that the heavens with all their countless hosts looked down on them in silent, but never-failing sympathy. And we, their pitiful descendents, drift through the world, without beliefs, pride, pleasure or fear, except that automatic fear that grips us when we think of the certainty of death. We can no longer make great sacrifices for the good of mankind, or even for our own happiness, because we know they are unattainable. And as our ancestors rushed from illusion to illusion, so we drift indifferently from doubt to doubt. But, unlike them, we have no hope, nor even that indefinable but real sense of pleasure that's felt in any struggle, be it with men or destiny.' (pg.180)
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A School for Fools (1976)
by Sasha Sokolov, translated by Carl R. Proffer
228 pages - Ardis
'It would appear to me that we have some sort of misunderstanding and confusion about it, about time, not everything is what it should be. Our calendars are too arbitrary: the numbers that are written there do not signify anything and are not guaranteed by anything, like counterfeit money. For example, why is it customary to think that the second of January comes right after the first, and not the twenty-eighth right away? And in general can days follow each other, that's some sort of poetic nonsense--a line of days. There is no line, the days come whenever one of them feels like it, and sometimes several come at once.' (pg.33)
Sasha Sokolov is actually a Canadian citizen, as he was born here during WWII, while his father was assigned to the embassy in Ottawa. He was raised in the Soviet Union, but repeatedly clashed with the order of things and was eventually allowed to leave. This was his first published work, and the one to achieve the most success; his later books are deemed to be untranslatable. According to Wikipedia (a dubious source at the best of times), Sokolov continues writing to this day, but does not wish to be published.
A School for Fools is narrated by a character that is mentally unbalanced and attends a school for the disabled, and whose narrative voice is actually at least two voices having an argument with each other. Much of the book consists of descriptions of the community of summer residences where the boy spends his time, and the story also focuses on several characters at the school, in the town and in the family. The prose style is the real highlight of the book, as it's told in a sort of poetic, stream-of-consciousness flow which constantly displaces the flow of time, and would probably defy rigorous logical analysis, but it works wonderfully well, even in translation.
There were times that I was reading this when I felt like this might be the greatest book I ever read. It does kind of plateau in the middle, and doesn't throw off fireworks constantly, like it does in the opening and closing chapters, but it is still such an amazing book. There's probably more of a story than I gathered at first reading, as much of the time I didn't try to puzzle out all the concrete details, and just flowed along with the words. For all the strangeness and unconventionality of the style, I don't think there's anything 'experimental' about it, that would associate it with post-modernists or the avant-garde; the form suits the content, and that's all there is to it.
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Sculpting in Time: Reflections on the Cinema (1986)
by Andrey Tarkovsky, translated by Kitty Hunter-Blair
256 pages - University of Texas Press
 Andrey Tarkovsky was a Russian filmmaker who worked in the second half of the twentieth century, and is widely regarded as one of the greatest directors in the history of world cinema. He battled with Soviet censors and bureaucracy to get his films made, and died young of cancer, so that he only completed seven feature-length films: Ivan's Childhood, Andrey Rublev, Solaris, The Mirror, Stalker, Nostalghia, and The Sacrifice - the last two made in Western Europe as an exile. Tarkvosky's films are notable for their long, meditative takes, minimal dramatic narrative, and preoccupation with philosophic, artistic, and religious themes. He worked on this book for several years and the last chapter was dictated a few weeks before his death. This isn't just a book about film-making, but about art, and life in general. There is a long middle section that deals with various issues specific to cinema, but overall Tarkovsky talks more generally about his vision of the world and the meaning and necessity of art, love, and faith. It can be a dense read, and I don't agree with everything he says, but reading it is a very deep experience in which you get very close to someone who entirely bares his soul in his quest to find kindred spirits, and to provide the 'experience of art' to others, because he believes it is in our contemplation of masterpieces of art that we begin to discover the existence and depths of our own soul, the potential of our lives, and the possibility of choosing goodness. Also included are many black-and-white stills from his films, and some of the poems of his father, Arseniy, which have been featured in the films. It's hard to imagine a stranger character emerging from the oppressive and restrictive Soviet cultural apparatus. Though Tarkovsky was concerned most of all with the oppressiveness of materialism, the religious experience, and the necessity of turning to God, he had to work under a system that explicitly suppressed religion and even demanded that he scratch out the word 'God' in many of his scripts. I think that, apart from the intrinsic value of his work, which is immense, Tarkovsky, in his pioneering work in expanding cinematic language, serves as an excellent model for the religious-minded artist in the modern age. His work does not wallow in sentimentality or provide simple-minded historical or moral lessons, and more importantly he is very much of his times, fully embracing the present, in a world in which religious passion and idealization of the past are often horribly confused. 'I see it as my duty to stimulate reflection on what is essentially human and eternal in each individual soul, and which all too often a person will pass by, even though his fate lies in his hands. He is too busy chasing after phantoms and bowing down to idols. In the end everything can be reduced to the one simple element which is all a person can count upon in his existence: the capacity to love. That element can grow within the soul to become the supreme factor which determines the meaning of a person's life. My function is to make whoever sees my films aware of his need to love and to give his love, and aware that beauty is summoning him.' (pg.200)
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The Major Plays
by Anton Chekhov, translated by Ann Dunnigan
382 pages - Signet Classic
This book contains five plays by Chekhov, generally considered his best work for the stage: "Ivanov", "The Sea Gull", "Uncle Vanya", "The Three Sisters", and "The Cherry Orchard". All of them take place on country estates or in provincial towns in Russia, far from the large cities. I think I liked these best in descending order - the first two were quite excellent, "Uncle Vanya" was quite good as well, but the last two did not seem that remarkable. This might be due to the feeling of repetition, as the same plots and character-types re-occur over and over. Indeed, it's an identifying mark of Chekhov that he never really creates any individuals that you could imagine stepping off the stage and into life. Also, in the later plays he seems a touch more worried about 'issues' and 'ideas', whereas the earlier plays simply presented people existing without passion, which I thought made for a stronger impression. Still, the first two plays here are some of the best stuff I've read in a while, though I'm amused that I'm getting cheered up by stories that keep ending in suicide.
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Stories and Legends
by Leo Tolstoy, translated by Louise & Aylmer Maude, illustrated by Alexander Alexeieff
224 pages - Pantheon
This is a collection of various Tolstoy stories, mostly based on folktales and legends, which he wrote in late in his life. They're all grounded in Christianity, and while they're quite charming and excellently written, they do repeat a theme and so the book is best sampled in pieces and not read straight through. I've read a few of these before, in collections and online, but it wasn't a chore to read them again. Along with a black-and-white illustration at the start of each story, scattered through the book are some colour illustrations that are absolutely stunning. My favourite stories were probably "Where Love Is, God Is", which illustrates Christ's words about how behaviour towards strangers is behaviour towards Him, and "The Three Hermits", which is by far the strangest and most uncanny of these tales.
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Envy (1927)
by Yuri Olesha, translated by Clarence Brown
129 pages - as included in The Portable Twentieth-Century Russian Reader - Penguin Classics
'Only think: A famous man made me his intimate companion, a remarkable civic leader took me into his home. I want to tell you what my feelings are.
To tell you the truth, they all come down to one single feeling: hatred.'
Nikolai Kavalerov is a 27-year-old who hasn't made anything of himself despite his lofty dreams and ambitions. One night, after getting thrown out of a bar and passing out drunk in the gutter, he is picked up by Andrei Babichev, a high-ranking bureaucrat who, following a kindly impulse, takes him home and gives him a menial job as his assistant. Andrei B. is mostly concerned with improving the diet of the people by constructing an immense cafeteria where everyone will get the most nutritious meals at the lowest prices, entirely divorcing the act of sitting down to a meal from any social or family life. Andrei has a long-running feud with his brother, Ivan, who is a fanciful and boastful dreamer, and Ivan talks about constructing an all-purpose machine he names Ophelia, that will embody all the remaining emotions of the people of the past before they are swept away entirely by the new Soviet order.
This short novel is split into two parts, which are quite distinct. The first part is narrated by Kavalerov, and is I think the stronger and more distinct part. You could call this 'Worker and Parasite' as Kavarelov entirely despises the good-natured thick-headedness of Andrei B., who brings a zeal for his government work that makes him seem inhuman and an enemy, even though his greatest joys are things like creating the best mass-produced sausage. This is a delicious mix of the sort of mania and flights of fancy of Gogol with some of the anxiety-ridden social scenes of Dostoevsky, mixed in with something else entirely unique. It's such a joy to follow the narrator as he just walks down the street and trumpets turn into ears and clouds into floating continents while inanimate objects move into his path to trip him up or take a bite out of his leg.
The second part is told in the third person (maybe? perhaps it's a puzzle to be interpreted otherwise), and is more focused on Ivan B., who is an eccentric spinner of tall tales, and wants to gather all the emotions of the old human for one last shining moment before they inevitably give way to the new socialist reality. There are still some fantastic sections here too, but there seems to be a bit of a loss of steam, as somewhere near the end about 10 pages are devoted to a fairly pedestrian description (compared to the rest of the book) of a soccer game. And I have absolutely no idea what to make of the ending, which is the height of ambiguity.
This would be a fascinating work taken all by itself, but it's also the last gasp of individual expression before the communists would fully clamp down. All through the story is the idea that the age of heroic deeds, of positive and negative emotions, of individualism and familial ties is passing; passing into the New Man (also often referred to as the new Edison) who will not just work in factories but eat and live in them, will only think of the progress of the masses, and the only emotion felt will be indifference. The healthy, beautiful, successful characters in the book are harbingers of the new age, but there are still failures, drunkards, dreamers and the mentally unbalanced who cling to the old world. Different readers have characterized this as being either pro-Soviet or anti-Soviet, but most can agree that it is just manic, crazy, wild. I love it.
The book is available on its own, though I read it in its entirety in The Portable Twentieth-Century Russian Reader.
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The Winter Queen (1998)
by Boris Akunin, translated by Andrew Bromfield
244 pages - Random House
Erast Fandorin is a young clerk starting out in the Criminal Investigations Division of the Moscow Police in 1876. He was a promising university student but the financial ruin and subsequent death of his father, his only remaining relative, forces him into a minor government position. The department receives a report about a young man who acted outrageously before shooting himself in a park full of people, and though this seems like a fairly simple case Fandorin has a hunch about it, and his supervisor lets him investigate it. Soon he uncovers more and more strangeness, takes a a trip to London, and discovers a conspiracy that seems to span the globe.
Boris Akunin is the pen name of Grigory Chkhartishvili, born in Georgia and now residing in Moscow. He seems to be a very highly educated person, and in biographical snippets I've read, he mentions that his wife loves reading mysteries but was ashamed to get caught reading pulpy trash, so he set out to write novels that were a middle-ground between pulp crime fiction and the Russian literary tradition of authors such as Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. He has identified 16 basic plots in detective fiction, and so there will be 16 Erast Fandorin mysteries. The series has become immensely popular in Russia, with 11 Fandorin books published so far, and 2 movies produced.
The novel certainly reads like the author is talking down to the reader, being overly cute with wording and 19th century affectations. Though there are a lot of russian names of people and streets, the story itself reads like any kind of thriller that might have been written in the west. And the actual resolution of the story is maddeningly inane. The character of Fandorin seems to waver as well, as at one point he puts a loaded gun into his mouth and pulls the trigger just to demonstrate his 'bravado', then later on in the story, when supposedly he has more experience and maturity, a figure at the window during a thunderstorm makes him jump into bed and hide under the covers. About the only time the book really sings is in the scenes with Brilling, a detective from St. Petersburg who gets called in to take over the investigation when the case becomes more serious. He's presented as a 'man of the future', and you get the feeling Akunin isn't holding back when writing this character, but makes him witty, brilliant, daring, and just glowing with energy. I wish the book was about him, but alas he won't be making any repeat appearances.
English translations are proceeding on the other books in the Fandorin series, with the first four in print so far, and more on the way, along with another series by Akunin about Sister Pelagia, a crime-solving nun. I think I'll take a pass on these, but I might be interested in the novel F. M., if it ever makes it into english, which is a search for an alternate version of Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment.
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The Village of Stepanchikovo and Its Inhabitants: From the Notes of an Unknown (1859)
by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, translated by Ignat Avsey
202 pages - Penguin Classics
The narrator receives a somewhat confusing letter where he is invited to his uncle's estate in the village of Stepanchikovo, is encouraged to propose marriage to the governess of his uncle's children, and hears the first of many confusing tales about Foma Fomich Opiskin, who was once an assistant of the uncle's stepfather, and has now somehow set himself up as a tyrant of the household. When he arrives at the estate the narrator is introduced to the self-centred, egotistical, and outrageous Opiskin, begins to suspect that perhaps his widower uncle and the governess are actually in love with each other, and meets a whole range of other eccentric characters, such as a half-mad lady who has recently inherited a fortune, and who has a number of suitors looking to marry her strictly for her money. This book has sometimes been translated as The Friend of the Family.
This is the first novel Dostoevsky wrote after he was released from prison, and it's a bit odd to see him try his hand at provincial comedy, without taking much care to provide depth or reality to the personality of the characters. There's some amusing moments, and the last chapter or two actually work quite well, the happy note of the ending somewhat anticipating the ending of Karamazov, but overall the book is just mediocre. The horrible and grating Opiskin is somewhat modeled on Gogol, specifically on the stuffy and paternalistic personality he projected in nonfiction writings, and it seems a bit mean of Dostoevsky to do that to someone he was obviously heavily influenced and inspired by. Actually, it reminds me of another character in Demons, who is an over-the-top spiteful portrait of Turgenev. As you can tell, not really interesting at all except in how it foreshadows future writings.
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We (1921)
by Yevgeny Zamyatin, translated by Clarance Brown
226 pages - Penguin Classics
"True literature can exist only where it is created, not by diligent and trustworthy functionaries, but by madmen, hermits, heretics, dreamers, rebels, and skeptics." - from an essay by Zamyatin
Set several hundred years from now, in a efficency-obssessed state after a great war, We is probably the first example of the modern dystopian novel. The narrator starts by describing his life in a totalitarian regime, in a well-ordered city that is entirely cut off from nature, where all life is lived according to a schedule and order, mathematics and rationality are triumphant. But D-503, as he is named, starts to feel some alienation from the masses when his emotions begin to take hold of him, and as he experiences more problems he realizes he has developed a sickness known as 'having a soul', and begins to interact with others who have this disease.
This book is written in a startlingly poetic tone, and sometimes a literal explanation of what is going on is entirely substituted with odd poetic flourishes. But even though I sometimes couldn't say exactly what was happening, in some strange way this book very powerfully made me reflect on many different things, caused all sorts of thoughts to come to mind. There's lots of things that could be said about this foreshadowing the horrors of communism, or its influence on books like 1984 and Brave New World, and the theme of the importance of our interrelation with the natural world--however, its most important message is probably about how we can be cheated out of real life, how our true selves can be stolen, and how precious it is to be a unique, individualized person with the freedom to feel, to love, to fail and to succeed.
( quotes )
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